Well, lying is too harsh a word. If you want to pen a novel about Abraham Lincoln hunting vampires, you have a perfect right to do so, and it doesn’t make you a liar. Historical novels are by definition fiction. Novelists should be able to write whatever they please, and so should screenwriters. I enjoyed the movie Gladiator even though it’s not remotely historically accurate. To start with, Emperor Commodus wasn’t killed fighting in the arena. (The real Commodus was every bit as nasty as the one in the movie, and he did get killed by his own people. Just not that way.) Still, I prefer historical novels that adhere pretty closely to the truth.

A British scholar interested in historical fiction, Peter J. Beck, has made these two points: 1) Most adult Americans and Britons have forgotten much of what they (hopefully) learned about history in school. 2) Many people nowadays learn about history mainly from films and novels. He has data to back this up. (My review of Beck’s fascinating book: Presenting History: Past and Present https://historicalnovelsociety.org/re...)

If historical novelists wind up teaching history whether we intend to or not, isn’t it better that we teach true history? Isn’t it better to help people get a real understanding of the past that they can draw on when, for example, they walk into a voting booth?

My biggest gripe with Gladiator is that the movie implies overthrowing a tyrant is pretty easy—just get a noble general to fight him man-to-man. Then the Senate can take over because it’s the noble general’s dying wish. But history doesn’t work that way. Rome had a republican form of government for nearly five hundred years. (It resembled ours in some ways—because our government was partly modeled on it.) A lot of people, some every bit as admirable as the fictional Maximus, struggled to reform and/or preserve the tottering republic. They couldn’t do it. People had lost faith in their government. And when the Roman Republic fell, it fell for good.

I think it’s even more important that novelists get the history right when they write about more recent times. There are topics in American history—slavery is one—that we need to approach with particular care, because of the potential impact on how we see the world now. If you write that Lincoln hunted vampires, you do no harm. That’s historical fantasy and we all know better than to believe it. But subtly distorting the historical record can have a pernicious effect on events today. There is also real potential for good in writing truthfully. Picasso said, “Art is the lie that makes us realize the truth.” Reading a good novel, we may grasp truths that would be obscured if we were reading a mere recitation of facts.

Can any novel be completely accurate? Not really. In historical fiction, novelists must select certain events and omit others. In both my novels, Augustus’s sister Octavia, once Mark Antony’s wife, is an important minor character. Augustus actually also had a half-sister whose historical role was negligible. I left her out of both books. I don’t think I’m doing an injustice to the truth by giving Augustus only one sister, or by not mentioning in my Authors Note that I omitted this obscure relative.

But with the big things, it’s important to clarify what is true and not true. For example, near the end of The Daughters of Palatine Hill, Cleopatra Selene performs a highly significant act after making an extremely hard and painful moral choice. The action fits what we know of Selene’s actual life and character. She really might have done what she does in the book. But we don’t know if she did or not, and I said so in the Author’s Note. I felt that in a sense I owed this not only to my readers but to Selene’s memory. If we historical novelists owe one thing to the people we write about, it’s that we do our best to tell the truth about them.

Truth matters even when it comes to fiction. Especially because how we look at the past helps to shape our view of the present, historical novelists have a responsibility to get the history right.