Rule of God

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Many readers will be surprised to learn that the essential events of the Dominium Dei trilogy are, in fact, historical. Even the attack on the corpse of the astrologer Ascletario by wild dogs was for real and recorded by the Roman historian Suetonius (c. 69—c.122 AD) in his book The Life of Domitian.

The Emperor Domitian of Rome died at exactly 9 o’clock on the morning of September 18th in the year 96 AD, just as the astrologers predicted at his birth and in the manner depicted in the pages of this novel. Immediately afterward, the Roman Senate condemned his memory to eternal damnation. Domitian’s name was erased from public monuments, and senators who had survived his Reign of Terror took up pens to condemn him in their histories of the era, from which much of Dominium Dei is derived.

The last apostle John was released from the island prison of Patmos under Domitian’s successor Nerva and lived out his remaining days in Ephesus, where the former “son of thunder” told anyone who would listen to love one another. Nerva, meanwhile, barely lasted as long as John, dying only two years after his reign began.

The true identity of Clement of Rome, the Church’s reputed fourth bishop after the apostle Peter, is far less certain. Jesuit scholars such as William Fulco, professor of Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, won’t even delve into speculation. Fulco is the historian of invaluable assistance to the author in the proper Latin translation and pronunciation of the title Dominium Dei, or “Rule of God.”

All the same, some historians dare speculate that Clement was actually the slain consul Flavius Clemens, and that the names became confused over the centuries. Other historians postulate that Clement was a freedman of Flavius Clemens, and still others another person entirely.

An unknown in history, perhaps, like the fictional playwright Athanasius of Athens.

Some accounts put the death of Clement close to or shortly after that of Domitian’s. But there is another account, favored by this author, that depicts Clement living a good bit longer than that.

In this account, Nerva’s successor Trajan banished Clement from Rome, and Clement went to Asia Minor, helping the churches there and performing several miracles worthy of Mucianus’s memoirs of the land. Later on, more than a decade after the events of Dominium Dei, Clement stood trial before his old friend, a very conflicted Pliny the Younger, who was now governor of Bithynia in Asia Minor. After a futile appeal on Pliny’s part to Caesar, Clement was martyred by being tied to an anchor and thrown from a boat into the Black Sea.

As for the centuries-old global conspiracy known as Dominium Dei, it doesn’t exist today in the 21^st century. Never has, never will.

It’s all fiction…